The Philosopher's Carrot
It is no accident that all that is revolutionary and scandalous in the work of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel came to be symbolized, in a uniquely umorous way on the eve of the second world imperialist slaughter, by a little gray rabbit whose very name embodies a dialectical resolution of contradictions: Bugs (nickname of a notorious gangster), Bunny (almost a synonym for gentleness).
A more or less urbanized descendant of Br'er Rabbit, Bugs Bunny (whose ancestors include also Lewis Carroll's eccentric White Rabbit and the psychotic March Hare) is categorically opposed to wage slavery in all its forms. Content with a modest subsistence on the edge of the forest, his residence is marked only by a mailbox bearing the name Bugs Bunny Esq. Aside from wondrous adventures that only rigorously applied laziness can lead to, his major "vocation" is pilfering carrots from the garden of a certain Elmer Fudd, and, more generally, heckling this same Fudd in ever new ways.
It is impossible to appreciate the genius of the world's greatest rabbit without understanding Fudd: this bald-headed, slow-witted, hot-tempered, timid, petty-bourgeois dwarf with a speech defect, whose principal activity is the defense of his private property. Fudd is the perfect characterization of a specifically modern type: the petty bureaucrat, the authoritarian mediocrity, nephew or grandson of Pa Ubu. If the Ubus (Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin) dominated the period between the two wars, for the last 30 years it has been the Fudds who have directed our misery: Fudds and more Fudds in the White House; Fudds on the Central Committees of the so-called Communist parties; all the popes have been Fudds; the best-selling novelists are all Fudds; Louis Aragon and Salvador Dali, beginning as anti-Fudds, degenerated into two of the worst of all possible Fudds. Almost alone against them all. Bugs Bunny stands as a veritable symbol of irreducible recalcitrance.
If the Bunny/Fudd choreography reflects a particular historic moment in the class struggle - a period of class "symmetry" in which the workers here and there win a few of their demands, only to be chased back into their holes in the ground - nonetheless the mythic content of this drama exceeds its original formal limitations. The very appearance of the stage of history of a character such as Bugs Bunny is proof that some day the Fudds will be vanquished - that some day all the carrots in the world will be ours.
Until then, one can scarcely imagine a better model to offer our children than this bold creature who, with his four rabbit's feet, is the good luck charm of total revolt. Confronted by any and all apologists for the status quo, Bugs Bunny always has the last word: "Don't think it hasn't been lovely, because it hasn't."